Executive Summary
Today almost every business of every size will be using a commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) product in one of their business processes. But COTS products are not necessarily appropriate for every system.
In this blog, we provide some information to help guide decisions about when commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) products are an appropriate solution—and when they are not. When purchasing a COTS-based system purchasers have high expectation in terms of value and the effort required to successfully deliver that value. This makes it difficult to make the necessary decisions.
Here we describe seven “rules of thumb”— thought points to challenge our readers when considering solution options and whether a commercial off-the-shelf software product(COTS) might be suitable. With each “rule” we provide a brief summary to help you in following the rule.
- Rule 1: Find the ways in which COTS products can help you.
- Rule 2: Determine the regulatory, statutory, and policy constraints on your system to decide whether they make the use of COTS products infeasible.
- Rule 3: Establish whether your system is subject to extreme performance requirements (e.g., security, safety, real-time) and whether they exceed the capabilities of the COTS products.
- Rule 4: Decide whether the requirements and users’ business processes are flexible enough to accommodate COTS products.
- Rule 5: Determine your ability to leverage the marketplace.
- Rule 6: If you are developing your COTS-based system by evolving an existing architecture, examine that architecture for its resiliency and its ability to keep on evolving.
- Rule 7: Generate a gross cost/benefit analysis.
While these seven “rules” are a great start they do not provide the whole answer, considering partnerships, the drive to standardisation with suppliers/customers can add additional dynamics to the thought process.
